Aliens: Colonial Marines was made in nine months claim insiders

Developers from Gearbox and TimeGate have spoken out against mismanagement and corporate meddling in the long, sad story of Colonial Marines.

Sega first acquired the Alien film licence in late 2006, with the first two titles announced as Colonial Marines from Gearbox – then best known for the Brothers In Arms franchise – and a role-playing game from Fallout: New Vegas makers Obsidian Entertainment.

But according to sources speaking to website Kotaku the financial situation got so bad at Sega that by 2009 they only had enough money left to fund one of the games: which is why the role-player was cancelled, despite allegedly being nearly finished.

At that same time Borderlands became a surprise hit for Gearbox and they apparently chose to immediately start work on Borderlands 2, and outsource Colonial Marines to relatively obscure Section 8: Prejudice developer TimeGate.

This is all as previously rumoured, with Gearbox already having been forced to deny the fact that in the end they only worked on the multiplayer modes of Colonial Marines.

The Kotaku report goes further though, and suggests that in late 2010, when Gearbox handed over their homework for TimeGate to finish, it turned out that they’d barely started. Despite having been on the project for four years at this point.

Allegedly Gearbox hadn’t even written a script for the game, and so not only did TimeGate have to create the game almost from scratch but Sega began interfering in the process and demand a more Call Of Duty style feel – with more human enemies and less aliens.

As for the infamous non-playable E3 2011 demo, which looked considerably better than the final game, apparently it was running on a high-end PC that was much more powerful than any current gen console.

Gearbox apparently took back control of Colonial Marines in mid-2012, after Borderlands 2 had been completed. Kotaku’s sources seem to differ on exactly why, with some claiming that the game just wasn’t good enough and that it didn’t run properly on the PlayStation 3.

‘The game feels like it was made in nine months, and that’s because it was,’ says one of the sources.
Inevitably there’s now talk of lawsuits, primarily from Sega and aimed at Gearbox, while several people from TimeGate have apparently already lost their jobs.

We have no way of verifying any of this but we do certainly know that the final game is pretty awful, and that it does indeed look nothing like the E3 2011 demo that we saw in L.A. This was suspiciously never seen again, with almost all of Sega’s preview events since then concentrating on the multiplayer.

There has to be some explanation for how a game could turn out so bad after such a long time, and all of the above sounds worryingly believable.